Eyes on Rockridge

The rumors you've been hearing are true: California College of the Arts (CCA), with campuses in Oakland and San Francisco, has plans to vacate its Oakland campus at the south end of College Avenue over the next five years.
The historic Rockridge campus, which was fully established in 1926 by Arts and Crafts movement leader Frederick Meyer, is home to first-year students who take classes and live on campus and to undergraduates majoring in subjects such as animation, glass, jewelry/metal arts, photography, printmaking, sculpture and textiles.

That's what Libby Schaaf shared when Rockridge News editor Don Kinkead and I interviewed her at the Rockridge Cafe, a year after her election as Oakland's 50th mayor.

That is no small hope, as Oakland, still struggling to get on its feet economically, battles to mesh growth with heritage, gentrification with diversity, keep its sports teams and turn around its crime and school drop-out rates.

I recently ordered lunch online for an upcoming Thursday, although my husband and I actually saved it for dinner - sliced Chicken Marbella over kale salad and brownies for dessert.

To retrieve it, I walked several blocks to the kitchen of my Rockridge neighbor, Diana Pasquali, arriving between the hours of 12:30-2 p.m. as instructed and drawn in by the delicious smells wafting from behind her front door.

It was Caton who protested to the Rockridge public after the Locksley Avenue home that he and his wife, Ruth Paglierani, have lived in and beautified over 40 years was broken into twice within a few months earlier this year.

Their burglaries were part of a string of 10 break-ins and attempted break-ins along the two blocks of Locksley between Hudson and Cavour, which Caton alerted us to on the Nextdoor listserv and that also ran as a letter in the June Rockridge News.

"Sumer is icumen in" which, in at least two Rockridge neighborhoods, means the resumption of outdoor movie nights.

Residents of the 5300 block of Shafter and the Colby Park area host several films each summer as a way to create a sense of community.

"Thea"s a real community builder," says Sue Emmons, who has lived in her Shafter home for nearly 40 years. She means Thea Gray who, with her spouse Jeanine Mattson, moved across the street from Emmons only three years ago.

"Tech rules real estate" blared the front page headline in the April 11 issue of the Oakland Tribune.

And Heather Sittig-Jackson, a Rockridge businesswoman and 13-year resident (who moved in March to the Oakland Hills), hopes to capitalize on it - going even beyond the new 3-D walk-through video tours that prospective buyers now use to get up close and personal with prospective homes.

When we moved to Rockridge from the suburbs of Detroit almost four years ago, we realized we had landed in a walkable food heaven.

But one notable exception flew in our faces every Sunday morning - bagels, though available, weren't what we were used to. They weren't rolled by hand, boiled with honey, baked on the spot, and of moderate size.